Saturday, November 3, 2012

The Life You Always Wanted

“There is nothing better for mortals than to
eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil.”

— Ecclesiastes 2:24 (NRSV)

The life you always wanted, and
more even, lies in wait at the unfolding of simplicity of not wanting anything
but just simply to live. With little in the way of expectation, and a humble
gratitude to live this life, alive and breathing, we marvel each moment and we
are truly alive.

Is this, below, a concept for life
we can believe in?

That our souls—if we understand
them—have a simple need for us to live out a simple life: to consume what we
need to consume to survive and to thrive, and to find enjoyment in the
activities that make up our lives.

Is life any more complicated than
that?

Of course, there are the relational
components we must endeavour to incorporate. If life were boiled down to
comprise activities and relationships, and we would have simple and achievable
expectations on both those fronts, joy would be ours upon the realisation of
our expectations!

The Life We Always Wanted, Expectations,
and Purpose

Happiness in life is a very fluid
idea. We can make ourselves either happy or unhappy purely at the disposal of
our expectations. If we wish to be happy, and we want to be happy badly enough,
we’ll quickly realise just how important it is to have simple expectations.

The life we always wanted and
expectations both collide.

We can never achieve an acceptable
happiness living the material life where there’s a void of spiritual conquest
to meet God as God wants to meet us. God has designed life to be lived one
way—with the Lord Jesus at centre—and when we put things before that, in
preference, to the neglect of God, we miss out.

It is God’s desire that we have
simple expectations. We can take that one step further and see that, within
that, within simple expectations, is the kernel of need for a thriving
understanding of our role or roles in life.

When we meet our purpose—our role
or roles in life—and we meet that purpose with simple expectations we redeem from
God a meaningful salvation (not that salvation is anything but meaningful). The
test of a meaningful salvation is the abundant life of John 10:10, where Jesus
pinpoints the outworking of true joy.

***

The life we always wanted we can
know if we are honest with our souls. It’s about simple expectations, applying
the enjoyment of life, and a clear knowledge of our God-anointed purpose. It
has God, through Jesus Christ, at its centre.